Mystical Rose (20 page)

I made my bed, took a clean uniform from the drying line across the back of the room. I would have been almost finished buttoning myself when I noticed the small wrapped package on my — well, I guess it was a dressing table, though I never dressed at it. It was a plain deal table with a crate under it for a drawer. I would have written letters there, I suppose, if there was anyone I wanted to write to. I wrote to Mama my first week, and Gert, but they didn’t write back. I kept some old bits of cloth in the crate, and a magazine from a florist shop, and a postcard of Victoria Hall at Christmas. I think I meant to tack some pictures to the wall, but I wouldn’t have got around to it yet.

I held the flat package in my hand, thinking back. Jack gave me a beautiful pebble from the lakeshore, with our initials scratched on it, and the year: 1923. I’d treasured that for the longest time. Uncle Brian had sent dolls until he lost his job and came to live with us. Mama gave me an atlas on my eleventh birthday, and blushed prettily when I thanked her. A few months later Daddy took it to prop up the end of the bed, said he was sick and tired of sleeping on a slant. I never got it back.

Silver paper, with a true-love bow. The note was sealed in an envelope with a wax seal. I had never opened a sealed envelope before. My fingers trembled as I pulled up the flap.

The notepaper was as plain white and as thick as card. It was unsigned.

GREETINGS, ROSE, ON YOUR BIRTHDAY
.

I found that I was holding my breath. I let it out, unwrapped the package, lifted off the top, and beheld the birthday gift, nestled in a bed of tissue. Blue silk, smooth to the touch and light as thistledown. A scarf, pale blue border with white birds figured on a deep blue ground. I draped it around my neck. Oh, my. On my only hanger I kept a walking dress, wine coloured, cut down two summers ago from one of Mrs. McAllister’s. I held the scarf against it. I longed to try them on together, but the nearest mirror was in the bathroom and I didn’t have time. I replaced the scarf in its box, hid the box and card under my pillow, and hurried downstairs to breakfast. The feeling of dread stayed with me all that day.

Mother, she says, stroking my hand. Mother, come back.

I cough, and cough. It hurts. There’s a bayonet in my chest. I can see it, sticking out of me, looking like that film we saw where we worked during the war. A training film for marines, lift and thrust and twist and pull. One and two and three and four, with the lights flickering and the announcer telling us that our boys were learning to stick it to Jerry. We applauded every lunge, every earnest scream, every time the stuffing fell out of the dummies and the boys stepped back with their weapons high. And now I am a dummy and there is a bayonet in my guts. I cough and stuffing falls out of me. But the bayonet stays in, attached to a tube. I feel hot.

Mother, says Harriet, stroking my arm.

I reach up and pat her hand. She smiles. Not her usual scary one. This is a rare and unforgettable smile. Last time I saw that smile was in a dream.

You are alive, I whisper.

She doesn’t say anything. The nurse checks my bayonet.

I thought you were dead, I say.

In my dream, Harriet was lying on the pebble beach, with tangled hair and staring eyes. I cried and cried and carried her home, her dead weight in my arms nothing to the weight on my heart. I put her on the bed, and lost myself in darkness, weeping. I tried to pray but the words came hard, passing out of me like stones. I asked You to make my life bearable, to make me understand that the world without my child was still the world. And then on the beach in Toronto, with the smokestacks in the background, I felt my heart lifted, and I thanked You for bringing me back, for making life without Harriet bearable.

I am not here to help you bear things, Rose, You said. Remember? You can bear things on your own. Now, look around you, You said.

And I was back in Cobourg, on the pebble beach where Harriet had drowned, and I turned around, and there was Harriet, alive and running towards me, running with her hair streaming behind her like a banner and a smile like glory on her face. I was so happy, and so surprised — I mean I knew You could do anything in real life, but this was a dream! Pretty spectacular, I still think. When I woke up I went into Harriet’s room to check on her and of course she was gone. She would have been thirty by then, left home to live on her own ages back.

You can do anything, and I can’t even remember what year it is.

I don’t know if the Bluestone case worked out well. I suppose that’s a matter of opinion; it worked out fine for Stephen Bluestone, not so well for Harriet. Not that she complained, of course. Harriet never complains. She smiles and bears it, whatever it is: needles, bullies, flagrant injustice, an aging and incompetent mother. She takes a deep breath and turns the page with a heart
for any fate. How does that poem go? The teacher used to mark time with a stick on his desk while we chanted: Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labour and to wait. I remember rain beating on the window.

Harriet phoned to tell me about the outcome of the Bluestone case. I hadn’t lived in my apartment for very long, and I was still getting used to the clouds being so close to me.

Hello, Mother, she said.

Hello, dear. You sound funny. Are you all right?

I’m a little tired. They gave the judgment on the Bluestone case this afternoon, she said.

And?

And we lost.

Oh, I am sorry. I know how hard you worked on it, dear.

Oh, that’s okay. Stephen is happy, she said.

Something in her voice. Excitement, and fatigue. Outside my living-room window was a big grey cloud, hanging like a kid’s mobile, close enough to see every bumpy detail but out of reach even if I stood on tiptoe.

The Appeal Board turned us down, she said. They claimed that the evidence wasn’t compelling. The premier made a speech about the importance of the ombudsman’s office. And the ombudsman made a speech about the importance of the independent investigative process, giving cases like Stephen’s a chance to be dealt with impartially. Sanctimonious old fart, she said.

I was surprised at her. I’d never liked Mr. Sherman, not even when he was a lawyer, but I’d always thought Harriet had.

And then what happened? I said.

I don’t quite know, she said. It’ll be on the six o’clock news. Why don’t you watch it and tell me what you think.

Poor Ruby. Poor rum-swilling Ruby, bereft of love, of hope, of will, of friends. Who’d have thought Monty Belinski meant so much to her? She changed after his death. Not on the surface, but underneath she changed, like that house down on Wheeler Avenue when the owner knocked out a wall to make room for his grand piano. This would have been about the same time, back in the late forties. Harriet and I were living two streets over in the same kind of house, with almost the same view of Kew Gardens and the lake. The absent wall turned out to be an important one. Without it the house started to sag. It looked almost the same from the outside, but not quite. A month later it was condemned. And that’s how it was with Ruby. She drank a lot, and went out with men, but she always had. She looked and sounded about the same, but inside she was a different person. As if Montgomery had in some way been one of her load-bearing walls.

Probably not an exact parallel, because what happened to the
Noronic
was a tragedy, and what happened to the guy on Wheeler was just dumb. The neighbours felt bad, do You recall, and tried to set up a fund for him so he could afford to rebuild his house. And raised thirty or forty dollars, a week’s salary back then. He took it and disappeared, whatever his name was. I never heard what happened to the piano.

The local TV news was read by a young man with an intense voice and puffed hair. It still is, I think. A different young man. Surprising developments in the Bluestone case, he said. Shots of the premier and the head of the Workmen’s Compensation Board.
Shots of the ombudsman and Stephen Bluestone, whom I recognized from newspaper pictures. I didn’t think he was very attractive. Wide faced and flabby, and his hair too long. All a matter of taste, I suppose. He looked out of place amid the dark panelling, dark suits, bright lights.

I saw Harriet, behind the ombudsman, sitting off to the side. I couldn’t help noticing that she had a pimple on her forehead. She always used to get them when she was nervous. The TV camera stayed on her. The newsman was talking with a golden-haired parliamentary correspondent who said she had never seen anything like it. Like a miracle, she said.

The news showed a few seconds of the premier’s speech. I don’t know what he said because I was staring at Harriet in her dark suit. So professional, apart from the pimple. Stephen sat on the other side of the stage. He looked sad and awkward and in pain, sitting down in a plastic chair with his crutches around his ears and the camera in his face.

There were news stories coming up about sick babies and the dollar and a giraffe at the zoo who wasn’t feeling well. Unless it was the dollar that wasn’t doing well, and the giraffe that had babies. I thought we would move on, but the camera stayed on Stephen Bluestone.

Watch, now, said the correspondent. The camera kept rolling after the speeches. I saw Harriet beckoning to Stephen from across the room. She looked excited — I tell You I can’t see what she saw in him.

Anyway, the camera was rolling and Stephen stood up straight, and walked towards Harriet. Without the crutches. So crippled he can’t move his legs without pain, hasn’t walked a step in eighteen months, the ombudsman’s office and half the local medical
association convinced he’s a victim, and suddenly, like magic, he walked right across the stage and the crutches clattered to the floor. And everyone’s mouth opened wide.

I feel everything at once. I am old and young and drowning, living again a life I never got over. Dying in the present and the past. I’m drowning. I can feel the water bubbling up all around. I want to cry out, but the words won’t come. I cough and cough. There there, says Harriet, stroking my hand. Hers is very moist and trembly. I call out but I’m drowning, I’m drowning. The world is moving around me, back and forth, up and down.

You must prepare for the worst, says a voice I know. A nurse’s voice. I can see, very fuzzily, a white uniform. My eyes aren’t what they would have been.

Help me to sit her up, says the nurse.

I cry out. And again.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard that, says the nurse. No matter what they’ve done in their lives, how old they are, how accomplished, how many children and grandchildren they have, at the end they cry out for their mothers.

Poor dear, says Harriet, stroking my hand.

I’m so hot.

It was a couple of years after the
Noronic
disaster — not too much after, I still had those nightmares, though they were becoming less frequent — that he died. Mr. Rolyoke died, I mean. It didn’t make much of a stir in the news. I found out when my bank manager told me that the fifty dollars a month wouldn’t be coming any more. I couldn’t tell exactly how I felt. I felt like there was a hole someplace. Not just in my allowance, but in my heart, maybe, because I would think of Mr. Rolyoke every month when I got the fifty dollars — and I didn’t know why. He’d never visited, not through all of Robbie’s and my life together, all of Harriet’s life. I didn’t cry but I felt as if something long-standing and important had left me. A part of my past was gone forever now. Harriet was grown-up — talking about going on to law school now that she’d graduated. One of her teachers put the idea in her head. A hard worker, Harriet, everyone said so.

You could get a job right now, I told her. Sitting at the table in our room behind the flower shop, smell of mignonette and meadowsweet and rose. Sun slanting through the north window to light
the northeast corner of the room it only hits in the evenings in June; turning it all gold and glowing. You’ve got your degree, I said. You’re a smart girl, anyone would be glad to hire you.

She got that look that said there was no use arguing, and went back to the pamphlet from the Upper Canada Law Society. I went to tidy away the dinner dishes and tried to figure out where the money was going to come from. Not from Lady Margaret, I knew.

Then Geoff asked me to marry him. On his knee, in front of the fireplace in our front room. His face was red with exertion as he climbed back to his feet, puffing. I told him I was flattered, and that he’d have to give me time. Then I stared hard at myself in the mirror and wondered what to do.

You see, I explained to Ruby, if I marry Geoff, Harriet can go to law school. I can’t send her on my own.

Geoff owned three bakeries by then, rode around in a big black Cadillac. His nails, that day in the front room, were manicured. I thought I was going to die when I noticed. Maybe he had them done specially, the day he asked me to marry him.

What about you? asked Ruby. Do you love him?